When her maid had retired, Lucy began once more to examine her position, in all its dark and painful aspects, and to reflect upon the destiny which awaited her, fraught with unexampled misery as it was.  Though well aware, from former experience, of her father’s hypocritical disguises, she was too full of generosity and candor to allow her heart to entertain suspicion.  Her nature was one of great simplicity, artlessness, and truth.  Truth, above all things, was her predominant virtue; and we need not say, that wherever it resides it is certain to become a guarantee for the possession of all the rest.  Her cruel-hearted father, himself false and deceitful, dreaded her for this love of truth, and was so well acquainted with her utter want of suspicion, that he never scrupled, though frequently detected, to impose upon her, when it suited his purpose.  This, indeed, was not difficult; for such was his daughter’s natural candor and truthfulness, that if he deceived her by a falsehood to-day, she was as ready to believe him to-morrow as ever.  His last heartless act of hypocrisy, therefore, was such a deliberate violation of truth as amounted to a species of sacrilege; for it robbed the pure shrine of his own daughter’s heart of her whole happiness.  Nay, when we consider the relations in which they stood, it might be termed, as is beautifully said in Scripture, “a seething of the kid in the mother’s milk.”

As it was, however, her father’s illness disarmed her generous and forgiving spirit of every argument that stood in the way of the determination she had made.  His conduct she felt might, indeed, be the result of one of those great social errors that create so much misery in life; that, for instance, of supposing that one must ascend through certain orders of society, and reach a particular elevation before they can enjoy happiness.  This notion, so much at variance with the goodness and mercy of God, who has not confined happiness to any particular class, she herself rejected; but, at the same time, the modest estimate which she formed of her own capacity to reason upon or analyze all speculative opinions, led her to suppose that she might be wrong, and her father right, in the inferences which they respectively drew.  Perhaps she thought her reluctance to see this individual case through his medium, arose from some peculiar idiosyncrasy of intellect or temperament not common to others, and that she was setting a particular instance against a universal truth.

That, however, which most severely tested her fortitude and noble sense of what we owe a parent, resulted from no moral or metaphysical distinctions of human duty, but simply and directly from what she must suffer by the contemplated sacrifice.  She was born in a position of life sufficiently dignified for ordinary ambition.  She was surrounded by luxury—­had received an enlightened education—­had a heart formed for love—­for that pure and exalted passion, which comprehends and brings into